![]() ![]() The composer came up with a brief musical idea - a delicate melody with a dance-like rhythm - then expanded it to seven minutes using the classical form of a passacaglia (making good use of his studies at London’s Trinity College of Music long before his immersion in scoring for cinema). The most challenging sequence, Powell says, was when Toothless woos the mysterious Light Fury on a beach. When I heard it, I remember thinking, ‘Wow.’” ![]() John then incorporated that into the tease and then finally the full-blown, majestic Hidden World theme. Jónsi spent the day working with layers of his own voice. When we first enter that space it’s all very mysterious and forbidding. “Jónsi was in town,” DeBlois says, “so John set him up with a laptop and a microphone and had him focus on the Hidden World. Powell used Celtic harp, bodhrán frame drum, uilleann pipes, traditional Scottish bagpipes and, most uniquely, the voice of Icelandic singer Jónsi (of the post-rock band Sigur Rós) as the basis for the music of the dragons’ long-lost lair. Unusual instrumental colors help to convey the ancient world and its mythical denizens. Powell also conjured up playful sounds for dragon romps furious orchestral figures for the film’s massive battle scenes a stirring march for the Vikings’ exodus from their beloved home and, finally, an alternately lyrical and celebratory piece for the film’s concluding moments. If I had kept using material that everybody knew all the way through the movie, you wouldn’t have felt it as significantly as you do at the end.” DeBlois wants viewers in tears during those final farewells, and the music is key. ![]() ![]() “I brought all the themes back but in newer versions,” Powell explains. Yet he also had to be practical-minded about the arc of the score. You have to go to these slightly indulgent, dark, sad places to find things that might be potent for other people. “For this movie, I had to come to the studio at five o’clock in the morning, lock all the doors and write. It was an emotional process, Powell says. Music from the first two “Dragon” films returns in “Hidden World,” but much of the score is new: a dark theme for the villain, dragon-hunting Grimmel a “fate” riff that signals massive changes in the lives of the key characters lighthearted romantic music for Toothless and his potential mate and mystical, ethereal sounds for that “hidden world” of the dragons themselves. ![]()
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